Mustafa Hamid Profile

Abu’l-Walid al-Masri: A Biographical Sketch Early Life The veteran al-Qa’ida strategist and erstwhile journalist best known as Abu’l-Walid al- in Minya al-Qamh in the (ﻣﺼﻄﻔﻰ ﺣﺎﻣﺪ) was born Mustafa Hamid (اﺑﻮ اﻟﻮﻟﻴﺪ اﻟﻤﺼﺮي) Masri northern Egyptian state of Sharqia in 1945, to a family of the Banu Hilal clan. Now in his sixties, he has been intimately involved in jihadi movements throughout the world for the past four decades. Though little known to the public, Abu’l-Walid has been a leading strategic thinker for al-Qa’ida since its earliest beginnings and has also been its fiercest and most prolific internal critic. Little is known about Abu’l-Walid’s childhood and adolescence in Egypt, though he does record some reminiscences in his diaries and battle memoirs from later years. Many of these refer to typical childhood sentiments; in one place he writes of his happiness as a child when school was suspended because of political unrest, and of his delight whenever his math teacher was absent from class.1 At the age of six his elder brother, who frequented Muslim Brotherhood training camps in the desert surrounding their village, enrolled him in that organization’s youth section, and Abu’l-Walid would later write that the core of his belief system as an adult was instilled in him in those early years.2 The leader of the Muslim Brotherhood youth section, Brother Sa’d, who was a close friend of Abu’l-Walid’s older brother, taught him about the life of the Prophet Muhammad and told him stories about the battles of early Islam. In early adolescence Abu’l-Walid became involved with Muslim Brotherhood activism, but left it after only a few years and appears to have drifted away from interest in Islam and Islamist political action.3 Though he doesn’t say what caused him to break with the Muslim Brotherhood at that time, he refers later in a letter to the al-Qa’ida leadership to a divisive and extreme fundamentalist tendency in Egyptian Islamism that he found distasteful: 1 AFGP-2002-600092, p. 36. 2 AFGP-2002-600087, p. 12. Abu’l-Walid writes that his vision of Islam is the same as that which was formulated by the Muslim Brothers’ founder Hassan al-Banna and taught to him as a boy: “God is our aim, the Prophet our example, the Qur’an our constitution, jihad our path, and death in path of God the summit of our faith.” 3 AFGP-2002-600087, and Mustafa Hamid, “Chatting on the Rooftop of the World,” al-Sharq al-Awsat, October 26, 2006. 1 What happened to us in Egypt was that different organizations formed for Upper and Lower Egypt – I even heard about specific organizations for neighborhoods. These organizations would start out around a “fatwa section,” i.e., some genius suffering from juridical diarrhea who deemed himself capable of resolving any issue in heaven or earth.4 Abu’l-Walid recalls that on Egypt’s Teachers’ Day holiday in December of 1960 he went with his class from his junior high school to hear an address by Zahir Shah, the former king of Afghanistan, at Cairo University. He writes that the speech was so boring that the assembled students heckled and ridiculed the king, to the extent that the king was unable to finish his address, and that he and his class were nearly expelled from school for their disruptive behavior.5 It was his first real exposure to Afghanistan, and at the time he considered it an insignificant backwater. Abu’l-Walid went on to attend the University of Alexandria in southern Egypt, where he earned a degree in mechanical engineering in 1969.6 Around the same time he married his wife Wafa’; their first child was a son – Walid – and they went on to have five other children.7 After witnessing the many defeats and reverses weathered by the Muslim Brotherhood and other Islamist groups in the early 1970s Abu’l-Walid felt increasingly estranged from Islam and says that he found his personal beliefs tending towards Marxism.8 At some point prior to 1975 Abu’l-Walid moved to Kuwait and then Abu Dhabi, ultimately working in the latter as a reporter. According to his cousin and sister-in-law Safiyah al-Shami, who gave an interview to al-Sharq al-Awsat in February of 2007, Abu’l-Walid also worked as a Mercedes Benz mechanic in Kuwait and later owned an auto repair shop in Abu Dhabi. His primary interest was in journalism, however, and he would continue to work in that capacity until his alleged arrest in Iran. Radicalization and Jihad in Lebanon In 1975, while living in Abu Dhabi, Abu’l-Walid had a conversion experience and began to seek out Islamist groups. He writes that his return “to the shores of Islam” was occasioned by thinking about the Arab-Israeli war of 1967. In the next few years he twice made the pilgrimage to Mecca and actively sought out representatives of the Muslim Brotherhood and Palestinian Islamic Jihad in Abu Dhabi, though for a while he was unable to make any such contacts. 9 When a group from Tablighi Jama’at visited his 4 AFGP-2002-600053, p. 31. Abu’l-Walid would struggle against extreme shari’a legalism throughout his career as a jihadi leader. In 1994 he wrote in a personal memoir, “I still don’t understand why tactical measures on the battlefield or the strategic plans of army commanders need shari’a proof-texts attesting to their correctness, so long as such plans or measures do not contravene any well-known tenet of Islamic law” (AFGP-2002-600087, and Hamid, “Chatting,” al-Sharq al-Awsat, October 26, 2006). 5 AFGP-2002-600087, and Hamid, “Chatting,” October 27, 2006. 6 Mustafa Hamid (Hashim al-Makki), Salib fi sama’ Qandahar, p. 3. Downloaded as a PDF file from http://www.4shared.com/file/15220171/c1e49341/___.html (November, 2007). 7 Muhammad al-Shafi’i, “Arab Afghan Ideologue Al-Masri, Son-in-Law Sayf-al-Adl said Detained in Iran,” al-Sharq al-Awsat, February 3, 2007. Abu’l-Walid had a further two children with a second, Pakistani wife. 8 AFGP-2002-600087, p. 13. 9 AFGP-2002-600087, and Hamid, “Chatting,” al-Sharq al-Awsat, October 24 and 26, 2006. 2 mosque he was at first very excited by their call to carry out “jihad” by “traveling in the path of God,” and thought that this might have been what he was searching for. He invited the group to his home to hear more but was frustrated to find out that they were calling for a non-violent “jihad” of itinerant preaching and revivalism.10 Soon thereafter Abu’l-Walid was reunited with a childhood friend whom he hadn’t seen since junior high school. Referred to in Abu’l-Walid’s writings simply as ‘Abd al-Rahman, this man was working at the time in one of the Gulf states as an aeronautics engineer and had also recently experienced a renewed interest in Islamic activism; they would become comrades-in-arms for the following decade, until ‘Abd al- Rahman was killed fighting the Soviets in Afghanistan. In Abu Dhabi in the late ‘70s, they joined one another in looking for an outlet for their increasingly radical views. ‘Abd al-Rahman, who had begun to study shari’a law a few years previously, argued against going to fight alongside the PLO in south Lebanon, since the PLO was full of communists and other non-religious nationalists. They argued back and forth on the issue until a decisive meeting in circa 1977 with Shaykh ‘Abd al-Badi’ Saqr, whom Abu’l- Walid had met once before in Dubai in 1973. The Shaykh had been a personal secretary to Hassan al-Banna, the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, for ten years, and had fled persecution from the Egyptian government in 1954. He advised Abu’l-Walid to join the jihad in Lebanon, even if the leadership there was largely secular, since jihad was an individual duty and he would perhaps find Islamist comrades in the ranks of Fatah. In 1978, at the age of 33, Abu’l-Walid joined the Fatah movement of the PLO and fought against Israel in southern Lebanon.11 He traveled from Abu Dhabi to Beirut with another longtime friend and fellow Egyptian, a man whom Abu’l-Walid only ever refers to as Isma’il and who later died in Afghanistan in the same year as his friend ‘Abd al- Rahman. He and Isma’il did not share their plans with the PLO offices in Abu Dhabi and were careful to avoid detection by the Egyptian consular authorities, as the former were believed to have been infiltrated by Israeli intelligence and Egypt was then pursuing peace talks with Israel. At the Syrian-Lebanese border, Abu’l-Walid and the rest of the group he was traveling with were processed by Syrian intelligence; they and their passports were photographed. Nearly ten years later Abu’l-Walid learned that his and Isma’il’s names appeared one after the other on a Syrian blacklist of Islamist terrorists.12 Once in Beirut Abu’l-Walid unsuccessfully sought out members of the Muslim Brotherhood working within Fatah, though it was rumored that Yasir Arafat led an Islamist, Brotherhood-linked wing inside Fatah. To his disappointment, the PLO that Abu’l-Walid volunteered with was a “big tent” operation, and in the months that he worked with the organization he met “all kinds of communists and Arab nationalists and Sunni, Shi’i and Druze Muslims.

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